The golden age of Italian woodcut illustration began in the last quarter of the fifteenth century and lasted for roughly 100 years, during which period some of the most harmonious and delightful books ever produced issued from Italian presses.

Printing also came early to Venice, where by 1476 the pioneering printer and typographer Erhard Ratdolt of Augsburg had settled and begun publishing.

Ratdolt was just one of many printers, at first predominantly German, who converged on Venice, where by the end of the century there were more than 150 active presses.

Erhard Ratdolt

Most of Ratdolt's publications were scientific and mathematical.

He made these publications more attractive and often more informative.

He added ornamental printed initial letters, diagrams, and the use of color printing, all of which are seen in his Sphaera Mundi of 1485.

Erhard Ratdolt, made a brave attempt at printing colour illustrations from wood blocks, a technique which would be brilliantly developed in China and Japan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and then became of great importance in Europe in the nineteenth.

The frontispiece to a liturgical book printed by Ratdolt 1487 depicts, appropriately, his customer - the bishop who had commissioned the volume.

It is printed from four separate woodblocks,

You will see the black image and the patches of yellow, dark olive-brown and red.

Five years later, in 1492, Ratdolt printed a missal (Missale Frisingense) with an illustration of the Crucifixion.

He had this image colored by hand, and the result is extraordinarily unsatisfactory compared with the color-printed bishop of five years earlier. In the copy in the British Library the thick red gouache of the saint's cloak almost entirely obscures the black defining lines of the image. And whoever was slopping on the green paint has obliterated the crown of thorns.

Ratdolt must himself have been dissatisfied, because the next year - in a missal of 1493 (Missale Brixinense) - he used the same woodcut of the Crucifixion but printed four colors in addition to the black image (red, the blue-grey of the Virgin's robe, olive and fawn.

This time all the lines of the image, including the crown of thorns, remain clearly visible through the printed color."